Spoilers forward for the ending of We Were Liars, now streaming on Prime Video.

Emily Alyn Lind remembers the primary time she was screwed over in Hollywood. “However I am not going to inform you about it,” the 23-year-old We Were Liars star says over espresso on the Plaza Resort, her low voice nearly drawling.

She was fairly younger on the time — Lind has been performing for greater than 17 years at this level — and it concerned somebody beforehand on her workforce, seemingly years in the past.

“I got here out of the room kicking and screaming with my thoughts made up, tremendous cussed particular person,” she remembers. “I’m a bit blunt, when I’ve to be. I haven’t got an issue with trying somebody in the eyes and saying, ‘You f*cked up.’ And I did not have an issue doing that once I was small both.” That was “daunting” to folks, she says, even her household. “I am like, ‘Dudes do it. Watch me.’”

She wonders if she was cooler then, extra fearless. Youthful bravery will get overwhelmed out of you as you develop up, particularly for those who’re a lady. However it might need been extra like “faux confidence,” she muses, not constructed in something stable, not earned. As a child, she at all times needed to take the shortcut, the way in which baby actors can — on set, you magically turn into an grownup, or at the least should act like one. Skilled, rule-abiding, mature. Study early to anticipate that folks will deceive you. Don’t belief anybody an excessive amount of. Don’t give away your vulnerability to anybody however the viewers.

“Then I noticed that I used to be dropping loads of the essential stuff in my life,” she says. “[I was trying to] slide by with out being caught by life, by no matter god you would possibly pray to. It stopped working.”

Lind quotes, nearly offhand, the Buddhist trainer and writer Pema Chödrön: “Solely to the extent that we expose ourselves again and again to annihilation can that which is actually indestructible in ourselves be discovered.” Or: it’s important to open your self up time and again, regardless of realizing you may be safer in any other case, regardless of realizing there will probably be ache, in order to develop.

It’s a 75-degree day in New York Metropolis, however Lind’s outfit signifies she hasn’t but left the lodge foyer this morning: an extended black blazer overcoat right down to her ankles, a silk skirt, and stompy scuffed Doc Marten platforms, blonde hair in a messy bun. She seems across the Plaza’s cafe and reminisces about filming an episode of Gossip Woman right here, a number of years in the past.